Pookleblinky: Only 1% of users have made more than 1,000 posts. Less than 0.5% of users have more than 1,000 followers. As in irl friend groups, these outliers are massively overrepresented.

Fun fact: the median bluesky user has made 7 posts, and is followed by one person. The mean number of posts per user is 96. Only 323,532 out of 5,950,015 users have posted more than 10o times. bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Atlas - Engagement-Based Social Graph for Bluesky by Jaz (jaz.bsky.social) bsky.jazco.dev

Zipf's law hits *hard* The top 10 most prolific posters, post literally more than the bottom 90% of all users combined. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_...

Zipf's law - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

In word frequency you see zipf's law as: the most common word in a pool is used twice as much as the next most, etc.

Only 1% of users have made more than 1,000 posts. Less than 0.5% of users have more than 1,000 followers. As in irl friend groups, these outliers are massively overrepresented.

Fun fact: your friends are very likely *much* more popular than you are www.scientificamerican.com/article/math...

Math Explains Why Your Friends Are More Popular Than Youwww.scientificamerican.com The inspection paradox makes sense of social networks, long train wait times and why the call center is always busy

Basically, you are inevitably going to see the top few most online, prolific posters. They post *vastly* more than everyone else, they have *vastly* more followers than everyone else. Statistically everyone else is noise.

If you only paid attention to these freakishly popular and prolific outliers, you could easily miss everything else. Only 5% of users have made more than 292 posts or have more than 95 followers.

99.9% of Bluesky users have made more than 8,800 posts, 99.9% of Bluesky users have fewer than 2,300 followers. Look at your timeline. How well does it reflect the statistically average bluesky user? *Are* there people on your timeline who are in the 99%?

Basically: even without an algorithm, your timeline is going to heavily, enormously overrepresent the most popular and prolific posters. For the same reason statistically your friends have more friends than you do. And "the" is twice as common as "of"

This has a lot of interesting implications for parasociality and harassment vectors and drama and jokes and such. Basically the whole zeitgeist is carried by a handful of users who could fit in one bus, the rest are just along for the ride.

Largely reflects my off-sky existence, I'm comfortable with that. Being popular has never been an ambition, being available\visible enough is plenty. 99% of my bluesky followers\followees are new to my online life, not imports from other platforms. Early days, still.

*have made fewer than

following mostly furries and making heavy use of the Feeds feature is probably the main factor skewing my feed toward my interests rather than what's viral, I still see a lot of that mixed in too with some feeds and see the top posters occasionally but my feed is still 95% furries and art minimally

I'm so close!

Noise here!

Some laws are inescapable. When doing social media analysis and modeling in the olden days of 2007ish, we used to call it “the rule of participation inequality” or “the 90, 9, and 1 law” 🙂

I'm shocked to learn that I'm in the top 1% of bluesky users by followers. I thought I was a small account.

Makes ME feel a lot better about my 150-ish followers 😂

first time ive been in the 1%. I feel less evil than I expected

Almost on the top 1% of posters and I've not been here that long - got in just before the doors opened for everyone. Then again I was probably in the same rough area when Twitter was fun.

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